“Mitt”—The Right Man at the Wrong Time
Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary
01.26.2014 - 9:00 AM
commentarymagazine.com 
For those who supported Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election, reliving the pain of his defeat may not seem like premium family entertainment. Yet if watching Mitt, Greg Wheatley’s documentary about the Republican nominee now appearing exclusively on Netflix, is not always easy to watch, it does give them a better idea about the man who was beaten by Barack Obama.
This is not a film about the issues that divided the country or the merits of the Obama presidency. ObamaCare is never mentioned nor is RomneyCare, the Massachusetts health-care bill that helped undermine the candidate’s critique of the president. Campaign strategy is mentioned only in passing and the strategists and aides who are working feverishly to put Romney in the White House are almost completely absent. Instead, the focus is solely on the candidate and his family, in footage shot in hotel rooms where Mitt is with the people he cares most about: his wife Anne, their five sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren. That means we don’t learn much about why the protagonist should have been president. But what we do find out is what a decent man the GOP nominee is. That’s something a lot of Americans who saw Romney as a remote, rich guy who didn’t understand them should have learned while the issue was still in doubt.
The Mitt Romney of Mitt is funny, kind, and loving. He’s also skeptical about his prospects of success, introspective, aware that he is a “flawed candidate” and frustrated about the way his opponents smeared him. He has a sense of his limits as well as a healthy perspective on all the advantages he received from his father George, who remains his hero. Contrary to the narrative hammered home by the Democrats’ unprecedented barrage of negative advertising, this is not a privileged character that was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
This Mitt seems nothing like the one who came across on television in two presidential campaigns (the film begins in 2006 and also encompasses his defeat at the hands of John McCain in the 2008 GOP primaries) as a plastic, almost robotic politician who seemed allergic to the business of retail politics. It’s difficult not to like or to care about the man at the heart of this movie, a verdict that should cause Romney’s 2012 brain trust to wonder how it is that they failed to bring these qualities across to the nation during the campaign.
But even if they had, it bears remembering that the task Mitt Romney took on in 2012 was probably impossible. Republicans were immune to Barack Obama’s charms and largely ignored the way most Americans responded to his historic status as our first African-American president. Nothing short of a cataclysm could have convinced a majority not to reelect Obama. Armed as he was with the fawning support of most of the mainstream media—a fact that is highlighted in the documentary in its footage of the second presidential debate when CNN’s Candy Crowley intervened to wrongly correct Romney during an exchange over the Benghazi terror attack—the president’s victory was probably never in doubt even at the moment when Romney hit his stride in their first debate.
At the beginning of the film we see Romney gathering his family to debate the pros and cons of a presidential run. Most seem skeptical and deeply aware of how a campaign and being elected would negatively impact their lives. But his oldest son Tagg reminds him that he had a duty to his country and to God to run and therefore try his best to make things better. Romney did just that, and if he failed it was not for lack of effort or a sincere desire to lead his nation back from the dangerous path on which Obama had placed it. As he says at one point in the movie, the candidate “left it all on the field” in 2012. Despite his shortcomings as a politician, it’s not likely that any other Republican would have done better. For all of the recriminations about 2012 that have convulsed the Republican Party since the election, conservatives should view this film and remind themselves that the man they nominated was a good man who would have been a good president. |
